Interaction Imagination

For over a decade now I have been advocating for slowing down. And it is so validating to read more and more about others also advocating for this... In Alison Clark's book "Slow Knowledge and the Unhurried Child" she writes about one of the inspirations to consider time... that of a traveller child that did not want to be hurried (page 13). It made me think of my own parenting. I have three children who do not like to be hurried. So we haven't. When my youngest turned two a

I thought I would start off the year with a simple message to slow down. My usual New Year wish to everyone is to make glorious mistakes - inspired by Neil Gaiman's statement Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life. Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it But I realise that making mistakes in a spe

As part of writing my book on Original Learning and currently as I write about risk (for a Swedish book Lek, Risk och Undervisning - Play, Risk and Teaching) I have found myself digging deeper into my own understanding of what play is and also how play is understood by others. Play seems to have very many descriptions and categories depending on who is doing the talking. I have also come to understand how normative many (most) of these play descriptions/categories are and ho

A toddler is a descriptive name of a period in our lives when we are very young.. to toddle basically means - to move with short and unsteady steps while learning to walk. It could also be applied to learning and play - lots of unsteady steps while in the process of learning. Of course in play children are not always just learning, they are also competent, and experts at play. In this kind of play they can walk confidently, skip, run and dance. What educators frequently do is

Taking the time to reflect... it should be one of the simplest things to do, and yet often it feels impossible... as where do we get that time from..? Often educators are not given the time or sufficient time to reflect both personally and also together with their colleagues. Every where we turn these days we are being told about the importance of reflection - to analyse the documentation we have been collecting etc - we know and understand the benefits, but reality often pre

Holidays are not something I teach or teach about… they are, instead, an opportunity to discover our multiplicity - after all, each family has their own way of celebrating - each child has interpreted this in their own way in combination with what society spouts out… From an Original Learning perspective I offer a space for the children to build relationships and interconnections between the traditions, each other, society, family and their own identity in a way that makes se

This is a post from my Arboreal Methodologies blog but with different photos. Listening is something that I have personally been working with for a long time. It has always been there as an underlying must, but when I started working philosophically with children I realised it was not enough for me to learn about listening, I needed to teach it too... or, at least, provide situations, experiences and activities that allowed the children to practice listening and discover how

This is the last in the series connecting to the talk for Play First Summit 2020 arranged by Teacher Tom and Sally Haughey of Fairy Dust Teaching. Having said that, the previous posts all turned out to be bigger than I had expected and will be continued in the future... it started with The Story of Healing where I introduced the topics I would be writing about... The Art of Healing started sharing ideas of how art can be a part of the processing and healing in pandemic and po

As I connect with other educators and parents around the world there is a consensus that the pandemic that is still rampant in some parts of the world has had an affect on the children in our care. Especially those that have experienced lockdown. Experienced not being able to play with their friends as usual. Not being able to go outside and play as usual. Not being able to meet the rest of their family as usual. For many children this has given them a chance to hang out with

I think education is very often about giving children facts to know - a series of facts, test them on it, then a new series of facts... An approach to teaching that is neither giving the children time to process the facts to understand them or time to reflect and see how all these different facts in different subjects connect and offer not only a deepening of understanding but also opportunities of creative thinking. i get so frustrated with the fast paced nature of education